LIMESTONE, Tenn. (WJHL) – It’s the first Tuesday of the month. You know what that means, right? Troyer’s.
More specifically, Troyer’s Mountain View Country Market and their Food Truck Rally. Every first Tuesday, rain or shine, the side parking lot next to Troyer’s converts from a simple gravel field to a veritable smorgasbord of food trucks, trailers and everything in between.
This June, more than 20 different vendors were slated to attend. Starting at 3 p.m., hatches were opened and flags were hoisted to let everyone passing by know that the rally was open for business. Traffic trickled in to start, but every truck sported a hefty line by 5 p.m. without fail. For one guest, early visits are the way to go.
“It’s been great, we’ve been coming to these things since it first started,” said Drew Lindsey, a longtime visitor of the rally who began her visit around 3 p.m. “It’s really nice, because we’ve seen so many food trucks start coming up, and new ones have started to come. It’s just really, really grown and it’s such a great event for this community.”
But that isn’t to say that the evening is over if you get there later in the day. Migrating from truck to truck is a strategy used by most who pay the rally a visit, and you’re guaranteed to find something worth having no matter where you end up.
Some fan favorites of the night were The Tennessee Hills Whiskey Kitchen, which sported BBQ and Poutine to die for, as well as Maybe Today, a Southern Breakfast-for-Dinner joint with spicy candied bacon that takes any dish that it’s sitting on to the next level.
Trucky Cheese, the grilled cheese powerhouse of the Tri-Cities, was out in force, and Pastor Pig BBQ made itself known with pounds and pounds of meat prepped for the day.
“Everybody knows that the first Tuesday of every month that there’s going to be food trucks,” said Erin Radford, owner of Pastor Pig BBQ. “So everybody plans on coming. We’re expecting to run through about 50 pounds worth of barbeque.”
To beat the heat, Allen’s Sweet Paradise offered fresh-squeezed lemonade and a sinful chocolate-dipped cheesecake slice poised on a stick and drizzled in a raspberry sauce.
If you want to get a taste of Maine here in the hills and hollers, Lobster Dogs offers crab, shrimp and lobster rolls (go figure) that will absolutely make the wait worth it.
All of these options sit right next to Auntie Ruth’s Doughnuts as if there weren’t enough hard decisions to make in the parking lot alone. If you ask any attendee, however, they’ll all tell you that the hardest part of the rally is waiting a month for the next one to come around.
